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chapter 2

Be Forgetful

the secret: find your resilience

The first time I had breakfast with Tim Ferriss, he was a guy about to launch a book that had been rejected by 26 publishers.

We first connected through an email he sent saying he was a reader of my blog and asking to have breakfast together at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas (which he knew I was speaking at). Amidst the chaos of that event, we found a window to have breakfast at the Hilton hotel across the street from the madhouse of the Convention Center.

That morning he was peppering me with questions about marketing and blogging and sharing his ideas for promoting his soon-to-be-released book.

A few months later, his book called The 4-Hour Workweek came out and performed better than anyone predicted. It catapulted to become a #1 bestseller and in the years since has sold more than 1 million copies.

The second time we had breakfast together, he had stayed the night at our house and we were talking about his unlikely rise to fame and what he was going to do next. That day, I remember admiring how he was able to see past his continual failures and achieve something great.

We love to hear stories like this: people fighting past their early failures to achieve big success.

British inventor James Dyson, the creator of the best-selling line of premium vacuum cleaners, famously failed in designing the proper level of suction for his cyclone-powered vacuum more than five thousand times before finally getting it right.2

When Harry Potter series creator J.K. Rowling was writing the first Harry Potter book, she was a single mother on welfare writing her book from cafes in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her manuscript was also rejected by multiple publishers before one finally took a chance on her.

The stories of successful people seem filled with plenty of failures and rejections like these along the way … but there is another side of these stories that you rarely hear about.

what they don’t tell you about failing

These big celebrated failures unfold over months and sometimes even years. They are memorable because of their duration and severity.

In real life, most of the failures you will have are not the sort of thing you will want to celebrate … or even admit.

What about the small daily failures that we have far more often? Failures like inadvertently posting that photo to Instagram without making sure there wasn’t something embarrassing in the background. Or accidentally missing a deadline for work. Or not having the answer to a question you should have known.

These are the tiny embarrassing failures that weigh on our minds in the short term. When it comes to building your resilience overall, the real question is how can you train yourself to consistently overcome these types of setbacks, forget about them and move forward?

To answer that question, consider the extreme example of people who manage to survive in disastrous situations.

how to survive disaster

When faced with a life-threatening moment, adventure writer Laurence Gonzales estimates that about 90% of people freeze or panic. What makes the other 10% maintain their calm and ultimately survive?

Gonzales explores this fascinating question in his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, And Why. The thing that sets survivors apart, according to Gonzales, is that “they immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation. They move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance very rapidly.”

There is plenty of science to support this idea that the ability to be resilient and overcome adversity has a lot to do with how quickly you can accept the reality of a situation instead of dwelling on what could or should have happened instead.

the art of calm

Beyond acceptance, the next step toward real resilience is finding a way to remain calm. Gonzales also tells the story of interviewing former NASA psychologist Ephimia Morphew-Lu about the curious case of several scuba divers who had drowned despite having air in their tanks and working regulators.

Morphew, the founder of the Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments, shared that after extensive study, researchers had finally concluded that the deaths were a result of an uncontrollable feeling of suffocation that some people feel when their mouths are covered.

This led victims to make the unintentionally suicidal choice to uncover their mouth and nose far under water and drown.

Panic literally killed the scuba divers.3

Being calmer in the face of adversity may not have such life and death implications—but when you add this skill to the ability to accept a situation and move on, you can become more resilient yourself in the face of almost any failure … no matter how extreme.

how to be more resilient

TIP #1 - Shift Your Explanatory Style

Martin Seligman is a psychologist who is sometimes described as the “father of positive thinking” thanks to his lifelong mission to study, teach, and write about the relationship between optimism and pessimism and why people choose one or the other.

In his national bestseller Learned Optimism, he describes one of the key differences between people who bounce back from adversity and those who don’t in terms of their “explanatory style”—a term he uses to describe the way in which a person tends to explain situations in their mind.

If you challenged a group of people to draw a cat, for example, a person with a negative, pessimistic explanatory style might say or think “I can’t draw anything,” while a positive, resilient person might say “I’m not great at drawing a cat, but I can draw an amazing house.”

Shifting your explanatory style to be positive and optimistic is within your control to do—and can have a big impact on your future success.

TIP #2 - Be Low Maintenance

When someone has a lot of unreasonable demands or requires constant attention, they are labeled as “high maintenance.” In the real world, unless you happen to be a highly-paid pop music star, it usually pays to be the opposite. Sometimes when someone treats you dismissively or without the respect you think you deserve, it is not about you.

Feeling overwhelmed can make us all behave badly or slight someone without intending to. If someone doesn’t return your message, choose to follow up with kindness instead of accusations. Most of us are just doing the best we can and many times the thing you need just won’t be at the top of someone else’s to do list. Get over it and try instead to have more empathy for someone else’s situation.

TIP #3 - Don’t Mention It (for Real)

When you hold a grudge or dwell on a string of failures, the usual way that it comes up over time is through minor comments or remarks mentioning it in passing that demonstrate how much you have not forgotten about it and have not moved on. To fight against that, make a mental commitment that once you have publicly shared that you are “over it”—you will not mention “it” anymore—even in small side comments.

This commitment is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, once you make the mental commitment to not mention it, you will end up really getting over it much more quickly. Of course, this doesn’t mean avoiding a problem—so if something is unresolved, you need to face it head on first … then you can actually move on and not mention it.